The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to embodiments of the claimed inventions.
Complex computing networks in many organizations provide security access to records (which may be also be referred to as files or other similar terms) and associated documents based on sharing rules. The sharing rules may define a highly complex sharing model in a database. People and groups that use the sharing rules each have a share table in which all sharing for the records of that person or group are persisted. The share table is denormalized, in the sense that multiple records having been shared with same set of users with the same access levels are expressed as different rows. For example, after user A shares a file X with user B and user C, user D shares the file X with user B and user C. In this case, there are 4 shares to be tracked: A→B, A→C, D→B, and D→C.
However, this model suffers from significant inefficiency in terms of the selectivity of rows based on access levels. The inability to express sharing rules in a normalized manner when querying for records is problematic. If a user would like to discover all records or associated documents that the user owns or to which the user has access, the query may be based on the union of all records owned by the user, all records that have been shared with the user, all records in private online social network groups of which the user is a member, all records in online social network groups, and all records in libraries of which the user is a member. A query that executes the above logic may, for example, take more than a minute for an organization with a million records, which is unacceptable. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide techniques that enable a system to provide more efficient record queries.